Catherine Mills

Catherine Mills is Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies (SoPHIS). She was previously Director of the Monash Bioethics Centre. Her disciplinary background is philosophy, and her research addresses ethical, social and regulatory issues that emerge around biomedical and technology innovation in human reproduction. She also has expertise in feminist philosophy and aspects of Continental philosophy, particularly the work of Michel Foucault, and debates on biopolitics.

She is the author of three single author books, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her books are: The Philosophy of Agamben (2008), Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (2011) and Biopolitics (2018). She is also co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics (2022).

She leads the Reproductive Biomedicine and Technology Ethics group in the Monash Bioethics Centre. She has received competitive grant funding from major national and international funding agencies, including ARC, NHMRC, MRFF and Wellcome Trust. Industry funders include Illumina, Monash IVF and Ferring Pharmaceutical.

Her current research projects include leading the patient and community engagement stream of MitoHOPE (MRFF- Funded), an ARC Linkage project on ethical, social and regulatory issues related to expanded non-invasive prenatal testing (with Illumina and Victorian Clinical Genetic Services) and an ARC Discovery project on the knowledge and translation of epigenetics within perinatal care. She led the first MRFF-funded project in the humanities in Australia, on ethical, regulatory and social issues raised by genomics in preventing mitochondrial disease.

Previous funded projects include an ARC Future Fellowship (2013 to 2018), on ideas of responsibility in relation to human reproduction. An ARC Discovery Project (2017-2019) supported research on the ethical and legal issues raised by technologies that permit inheritable modifications to the human genome, such as mitochondrial replacement techniques and CRISPR-Cas9. An earlier ARC Discovery Project supported research on obstetric ultrasound and selective termination of pregnancy.

She is a member of the ARC College of Experts. Previously she has been a member of the Human Genome Society Committee on Ethics Law and Society, and the Ethics of Gene-Modifying Technologies Working Group, for SHAPES, National University of Singapore. She has also co-coordinated the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network.